Your CISO is getting super stressed - and that could be really bad news

Stressed out businessman looking at laptop

(Image credit: Shutterstock / Roman Samborskyi)

Almost all Chief Information Security Officers (CISO) are under immense stress at work, a new report from Cyble has claimed.

Asides from the personal consequences, the company notes that for many businesses, this stress hinders a CISO's ability to perform, putting the entire organization at risk.

Cyble's “Implications of stress on CISOs 2023” report, based on interviews with CISOs working in SMBs whose IT teams have up to five people, says that 94% of them are super stressed at work. As a result, two-thirds (65%) don’t perform as well as they would like to.

Switching jobs

Stress also makes people quit - and three-quarters (74%) of the respondents had at least one team member call it quits in the past 12 months, while half (47%) had multiple people walk out the door. Stress also makes hiring troublesome. More than four in five (83%) have had to compromise on the staff, just to fill the gaps and keep the company running.

More than a third of CISOs polled for the report said they were looking to find a new employer themselves.

Board members, on the other hand, seem to be showing no understanding of the matter. Four in five (79%) of CISOs said they received complaints from the board about their work not being handled adequately. Almost all (93%) would like to be able to spend more time on strategic work, rather than tactical. In fact, more than a quarter report spending their workday almost exclusively on tactical/operational tasks.

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What’s more - when they work - they never seem to stop, as 84% had to cancel a vacation, 64% missed a private event, and 90% consistently work more than 40 hours a week - with no break.

To tackle the issue, the vote is unanimous - they need more resources. They need more talent, more tools, and more automation.

“One of the most eye-opening insights from the report was the fact that more than 50% of the CISOs we surveyed said consolidating multiple security technologies on a single platform would decrease their work-related stress levels,” said Eyal Gruner, Co-founder and CEO, Cynet.

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Sead is a seasoned freelance journalist based in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He writes about IT (cloud, IoT, 5G, VPN) and cybersecurity (ransomware, data breaches, laws and regulations). In his career, spanning more than a decade, he’s written for numerous media outlets, including Al Jazeera Balkans. He’s also held several modules on content writing for Represent Communications.